I
have to confess I don't understand the passion that so many people have
for vicarious violence. In films and video games for men the violence
is physical, involving absurd displays of massacres and bodies hurtling
from explosions. In many films for women it is psychological violence,
with the heroine often the victim for most of the film, until she gets
revenge, often physically (is that so their male companions will sit
through the film?), in the final minutes. Even television dramas like
Law & Order and CSI now wallow in increasingly barbaric physical
and psychological violence, and have tossed aside the mystery and
intellectual elements that once characterized these shows. Even most
television comedy is now based on humiliation and ridicule, a form of
psychological violence. This obsession with violence even shows up in
porn, which, although it cannot be too explicitly violent or
misogynistic (to get past the censors) seems overwhelmingly angry,
rather than about an expression of love. So-called reality TV is more
of the same, a form of public self-abuse augmented by a humiliating
process of elimination that lingers excruciatingly on the agony of the
losers' faces and displays of embarrassment.
Because of this dumbing down of drama and comedy, and in the absence of any good porn, my TV-watching is now limited to House MD and the odd non-depressing documentary like The Take (though I confess I do catch The Daily Show and Bill Maher from time to time), and my movie-watching is mostly 'chick flick' romances like Love Actually, Raising Helen, Jersey Girl, The Prince & Me and Lost in Translation.
None of these movies would make my top 50 list, but they're pleasant
entertainment with some clever writing in them. Of course the critics
have called them saccharine, vapid, and anti-feminist stereotyping,
which suggests they take themselves and their jobs far too seriously,
perhaps due to the dopamine and adrenaline addiction that such a job
must engender today.
I know several women and men who admit to
enjoying heavy doses of physical or psychological violence on the
screen, but they can't seem to tell me why.
These are people who appear healthy, work hard, have apparently
functional families, and have other interests I can relate to and even
share. But give them the movie theatre listings or the TV guide and I
can't bear to watch. It seems to be pure escapism, but what is it they
are trying to escape from? I
heard on the radio last week that there's a movie out that features a
real-life couple making love (and talking to each other as they do) for
two hours, with no other plot than that. If you want escapism, why
doesn't that beat two hours of psychological terror, eating worms or
axe-murderer decapitations?
None of the theories I have heard
for why people watch these films and programs -- boredom and emotional
numbness, imaginative poverty, the vicarious working out of anger, or
surrogate release from sexual frustration -- make sense to me. What I have discerned however is an epidemic of attention deficit, an inability of people to concentrate either for too long or too deeply on anything.
We are, after all, a species that for its first three million years on
Earth lived intensely in the present, the here and now, and our brains
were not (and still are not) wired to think and plan and stay focused
on things for an extended period of time. Have the media pandered to
this to the point we have lost our ability to concentrate and focus on
anything longer than a sound bite? Does the 'laugh track' so preclude
our need to pay attention that we can think about a million other
things (the cute legs of the person sitting beside us, the things we
have to do tomorrow, the Viper parked outside...) until we hear the
canned laughter prompt and then we can mentally replay the punch line
and (if it's not too complicated or subtle) belatedly laugh? Does the
dissonant music or the sound of guns or racing engines in the movie (or
in the case of porn films, the start of the saxophone music) likewise
prompt us to pay attention for a few seconds in anticipation of some
enormously expensive, gruesome, lurid and/or violent special effect,
before we let our minds wander again? And in the absence of any such
prompts, as in a romance or a whodunit or a documentary, are we unable
to gather any focus whatsoever, so we leave the theatre or living room
saying "huh, that (from what little I remember) was boring"?
The
second cause of this obsession with violence, I would hypothesize, is
the astonishing lack of self-esteem in our modern society, and the
pent-up feelings of rage, helplessness and frustration that this lack
of self-esteem engenders. The people I know with the biggest real
egos (as distinct from those who exhibit the most bravado) tend to be
among the least violent people I know. Some of them are depressed
(maybe they feel they should be doing more, with all the ability they
have?), but very few of them are angry. The people I know who are
angriest, and who are most addicted to vicarious violence, are those
who have been put down (or feel they have been put down) all their
lives. They are the men who are most misogynistic, most (beneath the
surface) insecure, most delighted to watch acts of violent retribution,
and who most associate with 'average Joes' who overcome adversity and
humiliate or brutally kill their subjugators. They are the women who
associate with the horrifically victimized women in film, and get
pleasure from seeing others humiliated (usually but not always
deservedly) in ways that make them feel stronger by contrast -- Schadenfreude.
I
blame our economic and political system, rather than bad parenting, for
this near-pathological insecurity and lack of self-esteem. The economic
system creates a demand for its overpriced, crappy products by playing
on our insecurity and lack of self-esteem. Buy this muscle car, or wear
these sneakers, or slap around the women you know and become a crack
dealer, and others will look up to you, so you will feel better about
yourself. Or eat these potato chips, take this viagra or this
pain-killer and everything will feel better, you'll be happy with
yourself. Likewise the political system terrorizes us with exaggerated
dangers (if you vote for a Democrat, they'll double the size of
government and make marijuana and assisted suicide legal, maybe even compulsory,
and let all the killers out of jail -- and encourage Bin Laden to
attack us again). It is in their interest to make us feel stupid,
helpless, powerless, to keep us in our place. It's not surprising that
it is the government and 'organized crime', not the big corporations,
that are the bad guys in most movies. They are the surrogates for
everyone who ever put us down.
If we could replace our economic
system with a Gift Economy, and our political system with one based on
self-sufficient, self-managed Intentional Communities (as my posts of
the past three days argue), I think our exaggerated insecurity and lack
of self-esteem would disappear. I'm not so sure that such changes would
cure our lack of attention and concentration. Although the Gift Economy
and Intentional Communities would almost assuredly reduce the stress in
our lives, and increase the time we have available for things we really
want to do, the firehose of information is a genie we cannot put back
in the bottle, and new, inexpensive technologies will allow us to
create even more, and more spectacular, distractions from our everyday
lives. Whether there will come a time when we get bored of the power of
information and technology to shock and exhilarate and consume our
attention, and turn from these emotionally numbing tools to
re-sensitizing tools like meditation and immersion in the natural
world, is anyone's guess.
Image is from the immensely popular and violent video game Grand Theft Auto
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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